Brooklyn Museum Building

The Brooklyn Museum is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Its roots extend back to 1823 and the founding of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library to educate young tradesmen (Walt Whitman would later become one of its librarians). First established in Brooklyn Heights, the Library moved into rooms in the Brooklyn Lyceum building on Washington Street in 1841. Two years later, the Lyceum and the Library combined to form the Brooklyn Institute, offering important early exhibitions of painting and sculpture in addition to lectures on subjects as diverse as geology and abolitionism. The Institute announced plans to establish a permanent gallery of fine arts in 1846.



By 1890, Institute leaders had determined to build a grand new structure devoted jointly to the fine arts and the natural sciences; the reorganized Institute was then renamed the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the forebear of the Brooklyn Museum. The original design of the new museum building, from 1893, by the architects McKim, Mead & White was meant to house myriad educational and research activities in addition to the growing collections. The ambitious building plan, had it been fully realized, would have produced the largest single museum structure in the world. Indeed, so broad was the institution’s overall mandate that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum would remain divisions of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences until they became independent entities in the 1970s.

The museum division of the Institute, which came to be popularly called the Brooklyn Museum, was conceived, moreover, as the focal point of a planned cultural, recreational, and educational district for the burgeoning city of Brooklyn. Although the scope of that envisioned complex of parks, gardens, and buildings changed after the once-independent Brooklyn was absorbed into New York City in 1898, many features of the plan were eventually realized and are reflected in what can be seen today. In the area of land once designated as the Brooklyn Institute Triangle can be found not only the Brooklyn Museum but also such other institutions and facilities as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Mount Prospect Park, and the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library system. Just beyond the western edge of the Institute Triangle complex stands the monumental entrance to Prospect Park, marked by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch (1892) in the center of Grand Army Plaza.

On September 14, 1895, the P. J. Carlin construction company broke ground for the west wing to begin the project. This initial wing was completed and opened to the public in 1897. 

During construction, the main floor was raised by five feet in order to create room for an auditorium on the basement level of the central pavilion. The principal entrance staircase therefore had to be extended much higher than required by the original McKim, Mead & White design.

Construction of the Museum’s central pavilion took place between 1899 and 1905, though the monumental staircase leading up to it was begun later. In 1904, the three-year construction of two sections of the northeast wing began.

Although preparations started as early as 1910, the next phase of construction did not begin until 1913. This portion of the building comprised the gallery wing on the northeast side and the sky-lit court of the northeast quadrant now known as the Beaux-Arts Court. Construction was protracted, especially during World War I, and the interiors were not finished until 1926. These were the last portions of the original McKim, Mead & White design to be completed; no further work from their plan would be undertaken after the 1920s. Even with the opening of the northeast quadrant, only one-quarter of the firm’s original conception had been realized.

Meanwhile the McKim, Mead & White firm was appointed to participate in the design of buildings within the new Botanic Garden being created by Olmsted Brothers on a fifty-acre site southeast of the Museum. Key elements of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden were carefully positioned to align with the Brooklyn Museum: the Cherry Esplanade is located on axis directly behind the Museum, while the mall of the Osborne Garden runs along what would have been the completed building’s western side.

For two decades, preventive maintenance of the Museum was deferred, and the grand staircase at the entrance of the building began to show signs of age. There was also growing interest in the 1930s in creating a more direct and “democratic” entrance into the Museum. In April 1934, while principals of McKim, Mead & White were out of the country, the Municipal Art Commission quickly approved the demolition of the monumental front staircase, greatly altering the architectural character of the Museum’s main facade. At the same time, the Museum’s original auditorium, located behind the stairs, was dismantled to create a new entrance lobby on the ground-floor level.

Further major renovations were proposed during the 1940s and 1950s, but budget shortfalls limited what could be done. In the 1950s, in a significant change, renovations to the center pavilion and the monumental rotunda included removing all of their Beaux-Arts decorative detail along with their columns, lowering the ceilings, and installing new lighting. The rotunda was then repurposed as a modernist sculpture gallery.

In 1967 the Institute again sought to address the Museum’s long-term needs. Of primary concern were the preservation of the collections and the comfort of visitors. The result was an extension, designed by Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen, across the south elevation of the east wing. Ground was broken in 1977 and construction was completed three years later. The extension houses the present Education Division offices and classrooms, as well as providing curatorial offices and mechanical space for two new elevators and a new boiler plant. It also set aside areas designated for a future auditorium and environmental control equipment.



The Brooklyn Museum was added to the National Register of Historic Places, New York State Parks and Recreation, Division for Historic Preservation, in 1977.

On March 4, 1986, the Museum’s Board of Trustees decided to sponsor a Master Plan Competition among international architects to guide the long-term renewal and expansion of the building into the next century. Fifty-seven firms responded to the invitation to participate, creating a variety of imaginative and thought-provoking designs for the building’s growth and further development. The team of Arata Isozaki & Associates and James Stewart Polshek and Partners submitted the winning Master Plan. Their plan provided a blueprint not only for major new construction but also for necessary renovations and improvements to the existing structure.

The first project of the Master Plan to be executed, the 460-seat Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, designed by Arata Isozaki and James Stewart Polshek and Partners, was dedicated on April 9, 1991, with ceremonies honoring Mr. and Mrs. Cantor, whose generous gift made the construction of the auditorium possible. The auditorium provided the first formal gathering place in the Museum since the original theater was converted into the Museum’s lobby more than fifty years earlier. The Cantor Auditorium provides an ample stage for performances, lectures, and other events, as well as projection for film screenings.

The Master Plan was awarded a “Certificate of Merit” by The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1992

In another phase of construction based on the Master Plan, on November 30, 1993, the Brooklyn Museum opened renovated gallery space on three floors of the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing. The redesigned galleries comprise 21,000 square feet in the Museum’s west wing, the oldest part of the nineteenth-century landmark building originally designed by McKim, Mead & White. The third floor contains the Museum’s world-renowned collection of ancient Egyptian art, while the fourth and fifth floors house special exhibitions.

The Schapiro Wing and the Cantor Auditorium received an “Excellence in Design” award from the New York State Association of Architects, The American Institute of Architects, in 1995.

The majestic Beaux-Arts Court had served a multitude of purposes in the course of the Museum’s history, as the home of performances, banquets, other large gatherings, and occasionally exhibitions. But by the 1990s it had become clear that its aging infrastructure was in need of serious attention, especially its enormous skylight, and a renovation project was undertaken. After more than two years of intensive work, a thorough refurbishment of the court was completed in 2001. Its two-story interior was fully restored. At the same time, the Museum’s entire two-and-a-half-acre roof and skylights were painstakingly rebuilt and restored.

In recent years, the Museum has focused on redesigning its galleries and reinstalling its major collections to make them more accessible to the public. Flowing spaces, vivid wall colors, dramatic graphic elements, and multimedia components feature in many of these reconfigured galleries.

The collections of American painting and sculpture, with significant additions from Spanish colonial and Native American art, were reorganized in 2001 to form the long-term installation “American Identities: A New Look” within completely reconceived gallery spaces.

The reinstallation of the Egyptian collection, which had begun in 1993 with a new presentation of later Egyptian art in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Gallery on the third floor of the Schapiro Wing, was completed in 2003 with the opening of the further installation “Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity,” featuring six hundred additional works of ancient Egyptian art, many of them shown in a newly renovated east-wing gallery space that had been closed to the public for decades. 

At the same time, the Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Near Eastern Art was renovated and the collection of Assyrian reliefs was reinstalled.

The Museum opened its spectacularly redesigned front entrance and new public plaza on April 17, 2004. The new entrance pavilion rectifies the architectural imbalance, as well as resolving the practical issues of access, that had remained since the original monumental staircase was removed in 1934. Polshek Partnership Architects developed the design concept for this multi-stage, $63-million-dollar capital construction project.

With the nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts facade as a backdrop, a two-story glass entrance pavilion, named the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion and Lobby, provides a sense of direct connection between the interior of the building and the exterior surroundings, while bringing natural light into the formerly dark interior. The new 15,000-square-foot glass pavilion, recalling the staircase of the original McKim, Mead & White entrance, combined with the renovated lobby area of nearly 9,000 square feet, creates an entirely new entrance facility that more than doubles the size of the previous lobby area. Among the amenities is a new, full-service Visitor Center offering information, ticketing, and a range of services to the public.

Within the pavilion, the brick support piers that once housed the five front doors have been “excavated,” restored, and left permanently exposed, showing the foundations of the institution both structurally and symbolically. Above the main pavilion level, an elevated promenade provides inviting views into the interior as well as a sweeping overview of the plaza and the surrounding neighborhood.

As part of the entrance pavilion project, construction of a new public plaza on the north side of the building was completed in 2004. The front plaza area encompasses more than 80,000 square feet, much of it reclaimed from what was once a large, unused, fenced-in area, which is now entirely open to the public. The new plaza area includes a “front stoop” providing multiple options for programming as well as areas for informal gatherings. It also includes two water features created by WET Design, the firm that designed the famous fountains at the Los Angeles Music Center and the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. One of the features, a fountain, provides a versatile array of vertical “dancing” water jets that may be programmed in a variety of dynamic patterns. The other water feature, a shallow reflecting pool over black granite beneath a spiral outdoor ornamental stair, is on the west side of the entrance pavilion. The plaza area also features permanent benches along with numerous cherry trees and other plantings.

The Rubin Pavilion and Lobby and the public plaza have received a number of awards: “Project of the Year: Cultural” award, New York Construction, 2004; “Special Recognition Award,” The Art Commission of the City of New York, July 12, 2004; “Gold Award for Engineering Excellence,” American Council of Engineering Companies of New York, April 2, 2005; “Arts & Culture” award, Building Brooklyn Awards, June 28, 2005; and “Merit Award,” American Institute of Architects New York State Inc., 2006.

After a multi-year refurbishment project, the Museum’s Libraries and Archives reopened to the public on October 20, 2004, in a greatly enhanced space comprising 7,000 square feet on the Museum’s second floor. The Libraries were completely renovated and now feature new storage facilities with climate control throughout and a dramatically improved reading room. Nearly nine hundred units of Spacesaver compact shelving, a total of nearly 22,000 linear feet of shelving, were installed in the Library stacks, providing high-density storage and replacing wooden shelving originally installed in 1907, when the Library was first brought into the then newly built Museum.

Established by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Luce Center for American Art, comprising 17,000 square feet, encompasses the long-term installation “American Identities: A New Look,” inaugurated in 2001, and the adjoining Visible Storage ▪ Study Center, a newly built facility that opened in early 2004. The Visible Storage ▪ Study Center is a 5,000-square-foot open-storage area providing public access to some 1,200 collection objects.

Visible Storage is a working Museum facility as much as other storerooms throughout the building that are not open to the public. As in the closed storerooms, the works held in Visible Storage are available for study, and maintained under proper conditions of temperature, humidity, and light levels. Two large, glass-walled bays in the Visible Storage ▪ Study Center contain nearly six hundred paintings from the permanent collection on rolling racks; the selection on view is periodically rotated to provide an ever-changing array from the collection’s holdings. Large glass vitrines also put on view the majority of the Museum’s collection of historical American sculpture as well as selections of objects from the American decorative arts collection and representative displays of Native American and Spanish colonial objects.

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened  in the Museum on March 23, 2007. As the first public space of its kind in the country, the center’s mission is to present feminist art and to explore its meaning and influence through a wide range of public programs.

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1979), an icon of American art, is at the spatial and symbolic heart of the new 8,300-square-foot facility. Encircled by galleries for changing exhibitions and a space for educational activities, “The Dinner Party” gallery is the centerpiece of a striking  design conceived and developed by the award-winning architect Susan T. Rodriguez, FAIA, a partner in Polshek Partnership Architects.

The center is notable for its dramatic use of large, canted glass walls to frame “The Dinner Party” in its own space. In approaching it, the visitor moves through a distinct, yet interconnected, series of gallery experiences that include the Herstory Gallery, other changing-exhibition galleries, and a study center and Forum for gatherings.

The Sackler Center has been recognized with a number of design awards: “Citation for Design,” American Institute of Architects New York State Inc., 2009; “Design Awards: Merit Award, Interiors,” American Institute of Architects, New York Chapter, 2009; and “Design Award of Merit,” Society of American Registered Architects, awarded to Polshek Partnership Architects, 2009.

In 2007, we began an important project to address the severely deteriorated state of the original glass-block floor of the 10,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts Court, the Museum's largest public space. A new floor was built over the damaged floor, while preserving the original. The floor consists of laminated glass panels, each the size of the original pre-cast concrete panels underneath. The new panels were set on a steel frame, and new hand-set marble mosaic tiles and pre-cast terrazzo, matching the original, were set between them.

The original floor panels are still visible through the new glass. This approach allows for the creation of a new, structurally sound floor constructed of entirely new materials while all existing historical fabric remains in place. Moreover, in the Great Hall, located directly below the Court, the original coffering is now visible, as a result of removing the panels once installed under the vulnerable glass-block floor (in effect, the Hall’s ceiling) as a protective measure. From the Great Hall, the view upward to the original glass blocks is essentially as built, and the amount of light transmitted is not noticeably reduced. This work was funded by the New York State Legislature and private donations. Architects for the project were Polshek Partnership.

The glass-block floor was named “Project of the Year” by the Construction Management Association of America, Metro NY/NJ in 2009.

The Museum launched a number of major construction projects between 2007 and 2010, which continued into the following years. While renovating approximately 47,500 square feet of space, the majority of these projects included improvements to our climate-control systems. This effort, which addresses the lack of air conditioning and humidity control in the original century-old building, continued over the next decade in order to create ideal conditions for the collections and our visitors.

The Museum’s Kevorkian Gallery, on the third floor, has for many years housed twelve ancient alabaster reliefs that came from Nimrud, a site now within the borders of modern Iraq. This long gallery was originally built with its floor slightly lower than the adjoining public spaces at either end, necessitating stairs as well as mechanical lifts to serve people with disabilities. To eliminate these disruptions, a new, sloping floor was built, allowing visitors to move unimpeded through the gallery. The reliefs remained safely in place during construction. Architects for the project were Polshek Partnership.

Despite our large and growing collection of contemporary art, there had never been a permanent gallery devoted to this work. With new walls, flooring, and lighting, areas formerly devoted to art storage on the fourth floor were transformed in 2009 into a 6,000-square-foot gallery for the display of contemporary artworks, with rotating installations from the collection. The construction expense was provided by private donations. The project was designed in-house by the Office of Planning and Architecture working with curators and the Design Department.

The completion of the two-story service extension added 15,000 square feet of space to the Museum in a new structure set into the landscape along Washington Avenue. The extension houses significant mechanical equipment to provide climate control capacity for upcoming renovations and provides a loading dock exclusively for the shipping of artworks. Offices and facilities for the handling and storage of art are also incorporated, as are major upgrades to electrical and communication systems. The service building was funded by the City of New York and private donations. Architects for the project were EwingCole.



The project was awarded the “Silver LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] for New Construction,” U.S. Green Building Council, in 2010.

A total  reconstruction of the Museum’s basement began in 2009 and was completed in 2010. While providing 32,000 square feet of fully renovated offices and work areas for security, operations, engineering, printing, food service, and carpentry and painting, the project was driven by the need to extend climate-control ductwork  throughout the building,  as galleries  were renovated. In addition, the work included extensive upgrades to our electrical, fire alarm, sprinkler, standpipe, security, and data systems. The basement renovation was funded by the City of New York and private donations. Architects for the project were EwingCole.

The Brooklyn Museum will soon complete an extensive, multi-year renovation of its historic Great Hall. Of the four enormous quadrants originally envisioned by McKim, Mead & White, the Great Hall was the only one to have been completed, leaving the building as a whole in an unfinished state that has created numerous challenges over the years for staff and visitors. The Hall was completed in 1925. Distinguished by its massive columns and ringed at that time by open balconies on the second floor, the Hall became the focal point of a series of galleries dedicated to non-Western art, primarily Oceanic, African, and Asian art. After the balconies were later sealed off to enclose the second-floor galleries, the space served as the Hall of the Americas until 2008.

The renovation of the Great Hall is a complex and transformative change that has proceeded in several phases.  The first phase, completed in March 2011, involved turning  the Great Hall, directly adjacent to the main lobby, into  a dynamic introductory gallery, giving visitors an inviting overview of our vast and complex collections. The introductory gallery installation, “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” opened in April 2012. The renovation of the Great Hall was funded by the City of New York and private donations. Architects for these projects were Ennead Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership).

During the second phase of the project, a number of spaces were repurposed and facilities relocated. Our Shop and dining services were relocated to open directly into the main lobby, and extensive structural changes were made to improve access and views from the lobby into the Great Hall. The new, larger Shop, which opened in April 2012, was designed by Visbeen Associates and named “Best Store Design” at the Gift & Decorative Magazine Retail Excellence Awards that year.

Our relocated dining area, recently renamed BKM Café and Bowl, includes a terrace for seasonal outdoor seating. Designed by Ennead Architects and Beer Associates, it reopened in 2012 and takes advantage of natural light and floor-to-ceiling windows along what was formerly a wide circulation corridor, where the Williamsburg Murals have been reinstalled. In addition, The Norm restaurant and bar, designed by Anda Andrei, Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture and Design DPC, is  adjacent to the terrace.

During this second phase, the Robert E. Blum Gallery, primarily used for special exhibitions, was moved to a space adjoining the Great Hall and substantially upgraded. No longer encumbered by the pillars that obstructed sightlines in its former location, the new Blum Gallery functions much more effectively as a welcoming exhibition venue.

Work associated with the Great Hall will continue over the next several years with the renovation of the African  galleries, on the first floor. On the second floor, wall sections will be opened, like the former balconies, and a new glass and steel stairway will lead up to the newly renovated Asian and Islamic galleries on that level.

Completion of the Great Hall projects will finalize that phase of work on climate control and associated technical systems begun in 2007. To date, climate-control projects have added 15,000 square feet of new space, renovated about 130,000 square feet of existing space, and provided the basic infrastructure upgrades to all building systems that will be needed, going forward, to continue renovation throughout the rest of the building.

As part of the Bloomberg Connects project, the firm Situ Studio was asked to design and construct new furnishings for the Museum’s Rubin Lobby, to further the long-term goal of creating the friendliest possible entrance experience for our visitors. Patterns of circulation have also been rethought. And at the same time, the space serves as a digital welcome to the Museum, introducing visitors to interactive features—such as our ASK app, which lets visitors ask questions and receive answers during their visit.

The Brooklyn Museum is a publicly funded institution that receives operating and capital support from the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Council. Additional support is provided by the Brooklyn Borough President.